Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule and see who's attending!

Teaching the DLF Project Managers ToolkitRobin C. Pike(1), Cristela Garcia-Spitz(2), Sarah Severson(3), Becky Thoms(4), Cynthia York(5)1: University of Maryland Libraries, United States of America; 2: University of California San Diego, United States of America; 3: McGill University Library, Canada; 4: Utah State University, United States of America; 5: Johns Hopkins University, United States of America

For the first hour of the workshop, members of the DLF Project Managers Group Steering committee will teach workshop participants about various project management theories and how they apply to managing digital projects in a library environment. While the waterfall method, moving from task to task or milestone to milestone in a project, completing each stage before moving to the next, is commonly employed in digital projects, libraries’ project managers are borrowing strategies from IT development and employing agile project management techniques for digital projects. Agile project management provides an advantage in its iterative approach, where different portions of the project can be in multiple stages, concurrently. Workshop leaders will discuss how they employ these strategies separately or in combination to build successful workflows. Facilitators will also discuss project charters and project plans, and how they’ve implemented these documents to guide project work.

The second part of the workshop will include a hands-on opportunity to work with many of the tools featured in the DLF Project Managers Toolkit. Workshop leaders will demonstrate how they utilize some of the tools in the Toolkit, such as Basecamp, Google Apps, Jira, and Trello, at their institutions, workflows built around the tools, and elaborate on why they chose the tools they did, and challenges they experienced in implementing the tools. As discussions on the DLF-PMGroup listserv have documented, project managers have encountered both technical and human challenges when implementing new tools and workflows. In this section of the workshop, participants will create free accounts for some of the tools and experiment with setting up projects under the guidance of the facilitators. The workshop will conclude by having participants brainstorm which tools they might select to implement and how they might implement these tools at their institutions, or receive support to purchase licenses for paid tools.